Warpgates
were opening around the plain in increasing speeds and quantities, spilling
ever-larger numbers of beings on to the plain. Two figures were chiefly
responsible for the flood of combatants: Immortus, the Master of Time and
one of the few beings on the plain of the M'krann who had no duplicates
there, angling for ultimate power; and the High Evolutionary of Earth-S,
a more bloodthirsty version of the Earth-Marvel scientist. Immortus used
his powers to summon up armies of humans from every epoch of time, from
the dawn of humanity (legions of lethal Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons who
understood no language but intuitively grasped that to obey Immortus' commands
and kill everyone on the plain would be good for their tribes) through
the first recorded centuries (the muscular half-serpent men from the era
in which the Dark Rider had ruled) to the end of humanity (highly evolved
men, women and neuters from uncountable millennia in the future who combined
biology, technology and sorcery in ways that made them far superior to
20th century man).

Immortus had not taken many precautions
before journeying to the M'krann. Although he'd of course known about it,
and Apocalypse's attempt, for a long time and had anticipated this battle,
he'd never imagined that so many beings would come to the M'krann, or that
they'd be so varied and powerful. Immortus had battled on like the others,
defeating the Sphinx by trapping time around the Ka Stone and then sending
the Egyptian spinning through the Vortex of Infinity, and then banishing
the Magus from the plain, avoiding a soul-sucking blast from he-who-had-been-Adam-Warlock's
soul gem and then trapping him in a branched timeline. But Immortus had
been too preoccupied with stopping them and avoiding the many death spells
and high tech weapons aimed in his direction--given his unique position
many of those on the plain thought it wise to take advantage of the situation
by trying to kill him--to stop Apocalypse, and now he was forced to take
care of everyone on the plain in a hurry, before Apocalypse returned from
the Shining City, at which point Immortus would deal with Apocalypse himself.
Immortus could not risk the expenditure of energy and resources it would
take to personally kill all those on the plain, so he fell back on his
time-tested and honored tactic of using millennia of human troops to do
his fighting for him. While most were no match individually for the beings
on the plain, Immortus thought they could, by sheer weight of numbers,
overwhelm the others. So he brought through troops by the hundreds of thousands,
until the plain seemed to teem and crawl with them.

The High Evolutionary's experience and
aims and methods were much the same, although his chosen weapons were different.
After the failure of the New Dinosaurs to kill the heroes of Earth-309,
he'd sent a signal to New Wundagore and began bringing through cyber-velociraptors
and enhanced Procoptodon by the tens and hundreds of thousands.